


Mumbai (to the modern tongue)

by justholdstill



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Non-Canonical Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-18
Updated: 2017-08-18
Packaged: 2018-12-17 01:41:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11841324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justholdstill/pseuds/justholdstill
Summary: Originally written for the femgenficathon on LJ in 2006.Prompt #71: "I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own." - Margaret Atwood.Wherein our heroine runs hard & far & fast from her memories of the war.The owls come. They bring scrolls of parchment;Nymphadora Tonks, some say – others, justTonks. One, in a loose, pretty script on blue lined paper, reads simply,Dora.She keeps all. She answers none.





	Mumbai (to the modern tongue)

**Mumbai (to the modern tongue)**

There are stories there, in the stones, in the soil, which the old men recite plaintively into the sultry dusk, which the old women pick up and hold on their tongues as they go about their work, mumbling about magic and tasting it in their mouths, waiting until later to whisper it in the ears of the children as they fall asleep and begin to dream it. It is in them, all of them, if dilute, seeping into the toughened soles of their bare feet, in the quick flash of their dark eyes. She sees it as soon as she steps off the plane into the near-liquid summer heat, and she knows, _knows_ , that she has not run far enough yet, but her money runs out here, her determination - and so here is where she stays. 

Her first few weeks in the city are difficult and bright and confusing – even with translation spells her grasp of the language is limited at best; she knows a few simple words, _yes_ and _no_ , _thank you_ , the words for tea and sweets, and how to ask directions to the market. She recognizes swear words (ones with no English equivalent, taught to her long ago by a boy at school) and laughs when she hears them shouted loud in this foreign place, but she muddles along in her jeans and her kurti, keeping her hair long and dark, charming the shopkeepers below her flat with her smile and her terrible Hindi. 

The owls come. They bring scrolls of parchment; _Nymphadora Tonks_ , some say – others, just _Tonks_. One, in a loose, pretty script on blue lined paper, reads simply, _Dora_.  
She keeps all. She answers none. She wakes each morning bathed in sweat, christened by another Bombay morning, and sweeps the letters and feathers from the window sill into the writing desk, unread. Writes, mostly letters to herself, but also small poems, something she hasn’t done since she finished at Hogwarts years ago. Catalogues the smells of cooking from the flat above hers – vegetable curries, pungent with garlic and sweet onions, cumin, fragrant rice, fish, cinnamon. She begins stories, fables half-rooted in life, but never finishes them.

The owls go. 

______________________________________________________________________

 

_When I came in you were gone. I walked around the room remembering you from the smell and texture of your clothes, the titles of the books you picked up and then put down again. One could learn you better moving among your things than when faced with you – I saw you in your papers and notes, in your half-empty teacups. In the idle doodle of a frowning face on the cover of one of your textbooks. I saw._

_Ask me now about history. Ask me about love. Ask me about flowers, about the ones that grow in the shape of a woman’s shoe, a woman’s mouth. A woman’s bleeding heart._

______________________________________________________________________

 

They died together, the three of them. It wasn’t something their legions ever dreamed of, seeing flesh and sinew burnt away, seeing their young bones against the scorched earth, laid out side by side, then covered over with a white cloth. Yet they were victory, and they wore it in their graves, on a grassy mound overlooking the sea. 

There are villages she travels to, when she has the time, where they peep out at her from gardens and windows, where they pose as idols in the temples and pretend to pray. The startling green eyes in the face of a beggar child are enough to make her turn around on the dusty road and move in the direction of home. She is not surprised, then, one night, as she readies herself for bed, to see Hermione standing in the doorway of her room, wearing a dress she vaguely recalls from a party that seems a thousand years ago. 

“Wotcher,” Tonks says softly, tucking her long t-shirt around her bare thighs, wondering why she’s striving for modesty in front of a ghost. The sequins on Hermione’s blue gown catch the lamplight and toss it back against her face, shattering it the way the ocean shatters light, the way that ponds and pools and rivers break apart the sun. She’s thin, exactly the way she was in the last weeks of the war, before they found the last horcrux – thin, and plain, and beautiful. Hermione moves her lips. She smiles. Tonks can make out the word _Harry_ , and a short sentence about about how hot India is, but the rest comes through in patches, obscured as if by static, like a broken radio. She blows a kiss, then, when it appears she’s finished speaking – and Tonks has to wonder whether she would have done that, would have been so frivolous in life - and, turning on one sparkling heel, vanishes, exactly as though she’d Apparated on the spot. 

After, she looks in the mirror; she stares her reflection in the eye. Changes her nose, her chin, the colour of her hair, so that it is Hermione looking back at her again. Then Ron. She slides back into herself, splashing cold water from the tap over her face. She combs it through her hair, feeling gooseflesh rise on the back of her neck from the coolness. 

In the morning she makes coffee in a chipped white mug, and plans to go to Amritsar. Nothing is constant.

Everything is the same.  
______________________________________________________________________

 

_And we can’t get to way down_  
From way up here  
(And somewhere boys are laughing)

_I say:_  
I have seen your face of joy.  
I have seen the world blown open. 

______________________________________________________________________

 

The women here, with gold in their ears and noses, gold in their ambition. The women here with dirt on their hands and cheeks, pretty babies settled on their wide hips. He would have liked this place, would have liked the dust and the dry and the monsoon. And the great city of silver and glass risen up in the cradle of the world, with all the noise it made. 

There is one man, a novelist, who asks, “How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.”*

Yes, she thinks, tell me. Tell me how I came apart for him. Tell me how I bent in the face of terror. 

______________________________________________________________________

 

_Ask me now about history._

_There are many gods in this country. I am learning about the goddess Kali, and her wrath like thunder. I am learning that the Khalsa Sikhs wear ceremonial daggers called Kirpans on their bodies. They know something about war here, old as the land is. There is blood deep down in the ground._

_I think when I first came here I expected the war to be at my back. I looked forward into the east and into the sun and I saw freedom. But violence rode with me across the continent. And I realised – I carried it here myself._

_I am still fighting._

______________________________________________________________________

 

In sleep she moves through the flat in London, the bed where he slept fitfully next to her. She is aware of her wand in her hand, clutched at her side like a weapon. It is a dream, she knows, because there is none of the usual gracelessness in her movement as in her waking life. No bruising her shins on chairs or doorframes.  
Nothing seems to be amiss as she walks down the corridor – even her grey tabby winds himself smoothly about her ankles, mewling to be fed. 

He is in the kitchen. They are all in the kitchen, sitting down a hot meal (even Kingsley, that great mass of muscle and brawn somehow wedged into the far corner). They seem to know that they are dead, laughing about heaven over take-away Chinese, and they draw her into their midst. Snape picks delicately at his sweet and sour pork, muttering snide remarks to the vibrantly red sauce at the ribald jokes Harry and Ron and Sirius are making. She looks around the table and sees every mouth pulled into a grin.

When all the plates are empty, she stands and clears her throat. 

“Don’t you lot have somewhere to be?”

“Yeah, I suppose,” says Sirius, leaning in to kiss her cheek. “But don’t you want a hand with the washing-up?”

She casts a glance across at Hermione, still wearing that blue dress, and considers the wand in her hand.  
“No,” she says at last, “no. I think I can do that myself.” With a swish and a flick, just like they learned back in first year, she waves her wand at the dirty dishes in front of them.

She is not at all surprised to find herself alone.

______________________________________________________________________

 

When she wakes again in India, sun like sweet yellow butter is shining into her eyes. Her head thrums faintly with headache, but she sits up in her shroud of white sheets, liking the warmth of the day on her shoulders.  
She dresses slowly, reaching at first for the trusted and favoured jeans, but decides instead to try the embroidered salwar kameez she bought in her first week here, because the cool green and yellow reminded her of the garden in Leeds, and of her mother.  
Fabric slips against her skin, like water.

She walks out into the urgent Bombay morning, bright among brightness, new against newness, and when she tosses her hair back, grown long and gently curling, it is pink and shining. 

They might recognize her, now.

______________________________________________________________________

_She is a woman of honor and smartness whose wild love leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now that only she can recognize in a mirror….._

_People fall in love with her. She still remembers the line of poems the Englishman read out loud to her from his commonplace book. She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.*_

**Author's Note:**

> * - indicate quotes borrowed from Michael Ondaatje's _The English Patient_. All else was written by me, except the bits that belong to the esteemed J.K. Rowling. ;)


End file.
